Not much in the way of Blogging tonight, “I’ve just had an unhappy love affair and I don’t see why anyone else should have a good time” – Prostecnic Vogon Jeltz. Well not really. Tonight was guild drama night in WoW, so I got a bit worked up, but I think we worked a few things out.

Now I just need to figure out where all the free space on newton keeps disappearing to. It’s one of the web browsers, I’m just not sure which.

Don’t Panic! It’s only the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, one of the best works of science fiction in existence. Created by the late comedic mastermind Douglas Adams, it is the definitive multi-medium self-contradicting SciFi trilogy in five parts. It began life as a radio series, which then became five books, six television episodes, two video games, another radio series and eventually a movie, all written by the same man. Although some mediums convey the Hitchhiker’s universe better than others, Adams succeeds everywhere. I’ve seen/played/heard just about everything Adams has been involved in, with the exception of a few of his early television shows, of which he’s written a few Dr Who episodes, and his non-SciFi books, including “The Meaning of Liff”(sic) and “Last Chance to See”. I hope to consume these once I find them. In the mean time I listen to the radio series and read the book from time to time for a good laugh.

On the whole it was a fun trip, a lot of walking up hills and down hills, but the scenery was great, once you got out of the tourist traps. I took some photos of the better sights, and of my family. A lot of these were taken with making a panograph in mind, but I haven’t stitched them together yet.

Recently, I’ve been working on LaserLine 2.0, software to view, edit and create laser light shows. It’s sort of a Final Cut Pro for lasers. It supports the industry standard .ilda file format for import and export. Personaly, I’ve been working on adding rudamentary SVG importation. I have about 80% of the basic drawing methods, with only a few things (relative path elements and eliptical curves) left to support.

On the whole, it’s interesting as my first serious Objective-C project. Although my unreleased “SystemBar Test”, an app that parsed HTML into a menu bar to display how much I’ve downloaded, was also a fun exercise it was no where near release status.

This very post was written and posted entirely using a newton. Not bad for ten year old hardware. People have even written software to deal with the Newton’s 2010 problem, while other software lets you edit the time zones to compensate for this years DST change. I don’t see the Newton dying until it can no longer understand the current year. This happens somewhere around 2037, so that gives a few years to write a patch.

I found this trailer while walking to pick up my car from the shop. Sadly the website it refers to, http://www.fun-balloon.com/, seems to be down now. But when I went to the site earlier it had information and forms on how to purchase a ride.

I also found BAGI, the Balloon Association of Greater Illinois. It appears that there are a few other commercial balloons in the Champaign-Urbana area, so I’ll have to look into them.

For those of you who don’t know, the title of this is that of the song Up-Up And Away by The 5th Dimension, or such fame as Aquarius. And no, these aren’t referral links so I don’t get a fraction of a cent if you click them.

As for why I’m posting this, my Mom always wanted to go on a balloon ride, so when I saw this trailer I had to take a picture so I could check it out later.

Back in January, Tauquil Atkinson posted video of a Microsoft Exec presenting the new features of Vista in what Tauquil calls Re-Introducing the Real Windows Vista. This isn’t your ordinary Vista introductory presentation, as Tauquil has replaced the video of Vista with video of Mac OS X. What results is the audio, describing Vista, matches up perfectly with features demonstrated in Mac OS X.